8 Nisan 2014 Salı

"Invalid votes" as sign of voting fraud in Turkey's 30 March Elections? I doubt so.

Erik Meyersson has a recent blog post that has received quite a lot of attention, especially in Turkey, which looks at the "invalid ballots" at the ballot box level and argues that the correlation between the AKP votes and invalid votes across the ballot boxes in major metropolitan areas points to a systematic voting fraud in Turkey's 30 March elections. I argue that Meyersson's post is (i) uninformed about the definition of "invalid ballots" in the Turkish context, (ii) fails to make a comparison with the previous elections, especially the previous local elections in 2009, (iii) fails to take into account one major cause for the invalid ballots that was the direct result of decreasing the number of ballot boxes from 3 to 2 in this election, and finally, (iv) violates the basic assumption of statistics that all factors other than the one under consideration or comparison must be random (the ceteris paribus condition in Economics).

You will see that there are 5 components to the invalid votes, denoted from (10) to (14), the sum of which gives the total number of invalid votes. Those components are:

(10) The number of invalid envelopes
(11) The number of empty envelopes which contained no ballots at all.
(12) The number of envelopes [that contained some ballots for other elections, that is, county mayor and/or county council] that did not have a ballot for the mayor election for the metropolitan area.
(13) The number of ballots that were counted as invalid.
(14) The number of ballots that were not taken into consideration.

I must also note that casting an invalid vote is a basic political right. As there are five different components of the invalid votes count, there are conceivably five different ways of deliberately marking your vote invalid:

(1) If you deliberately put a sign on the envelope that you place your ballot in, that envelope is counted as invalid (as in entry no. (10) above). Even if your ballot is perfect, any sign on the ballot envelope or any other problem related to the envelope will result in that envelope taken out of consideration. It will not even be opened.
(2) If you take the ballots you have been given with you, keep them as souvenirs or simply destroy them, and cast your envelope as empty, that envelope is counted as invalid (as in entry no (11) above) (As a further incentive, if you put those ballots into fire somewhere else, take photos/videos of those burnt ballots and post them to social media, you can even blame the government for voting fraud.)
(3) If you simply take the ballot for the metropolitan mayor away, but cast your votes for the other two ballots, this will only make your vote for the metropolitan mayor as invalid. Your other two votes will still be counted as valid (as in entry no (12) above)
(4) If you place the "Yes" seal on more than one candidate, if you mark your ballot in any other way (such as writing "thief" under the name of the ruling party's candidate, or "impotent" under another candidate's name), your ballot will be counted as invalid (as in entry no (13) above).
(5) Any other way that will take your ballot out of consideration.For details on this one, I need to check the Higher Election Council's memos.

Hence, when considering invalid votes, there are three possible explanations, which are not taken into account by Erik Meyersson:

(a) Those that are cast deliberately as invalid,
(b) Those that are mistakenly cast as invalid (I have witnessed several examples of this)
(c) Those that are declared or made invalid as part of a systematic election fraud.

One commenter to Meyersson's post, Yakup Ozsoy, stated that in Konya and Kayseri, where AKP won the election by a landslide, "people probably did not bother arguing about votes being valid or not. In other cities, however, it was worth the effort to nullify the vote." His comment concerns the process of counting ballots after the closing of the ballot boxes. How about people not bothering to vote at all, or to cast an invalid vote? In Konya, AKP received close to 70% of all votes in 2011. If someone, who could well have cast an invalid vote if he/she lived in Ankara or Istanbul, would he be more likely to do so in Konya, or would he be inclined to vote for an opposition party?

On the other hand, we know that Ankara, Istanbul and Izmir were all scenes of energetic protests during the Gezi events in June 2013. The Gezi protests were not simply protests organized by CHP, MHP or other political parties. True, they were mostly directed against the ruling party and its leader, Erdogan, but there was some criticism directed against the opposition parties as well. In Ankara, an MP from CHP, Aylin Nazliaka, ran a campaign to become CHP's mayoral candidate for Ankara. Certainly, Gezi protesters did not embrace Mansur Yavas, the former MHP candidate, and Mustafa Sarigul, famous for his corruption, in Ankara and Istanbul, respectively. Thus, it is quite possible that many Gezi protesters in these three largest Turkish cities, who were not satisfied with the opposition parties' mayoral candidates, decided to cast their votes as invalid.

Furthermore, as I point out in my blog post, some ballot result reports mistakenly included the number of unused ballots under column no. (14) above. An unused ballot cannot be an invalid ballot, because an invalid ballot is by definition a ballot that has been cast by someone and placed into the ballot box. This is a misunderstanding due to the legal language of the report that was apparently missed by some of the ballot box committee members. Hence, the data that Erik Meyersson uses contains figures for some ballot boxes that simply does not correspond to the reality. I don't know what percentage of the ballot boxes exhibit this problem, neither do I know how they are distributed across localities. But what is certain is that they obfuscate Meyersson's conclusions.

(ii) Comparison with 2009 local elections
Meyersson speculates the invalid ballots in this election is a sign that voting fraud has been committed, but he fails to check if the number of invalid ballots conforms with the situation in previous elections.

Let me first provide the invalid ballots for the 30 metropolitan areas in this election:

2014 Metro

Cast Ballots

Valid Ballots

Invalid Ballots

Invalid, %

ADANA

1.277.115

1.227.801

49.314

3,86%

ANKARA

3.274.380

3.164.555

109.825

3,35%

ANTALYA

1.358.582

1.315.452

43.130

3,17%

AYDIN

684.636

653.789

30.847

4,51%

BALIKESİR

809.458

783.155

26.303

3,25%

BURSA

1.794.353

1.720.587

73.766

4,11%

DENİZLİ

643.433

611.845

31.588

4,91%

DİYARBAKIR

762.646

723.072

39.574

5,19%

ERZURUM

409.135

395.935

13.200

3,23%

ESKİŞEHİR

544.999

524.725

20.274

3,72%

GAZİANTEP

909.620

881.824

27.796

3,06%

HATAY

864.238

839.523

24.715

2,86%

İSTANBUL

9.067.393

8.724.840

342.553

3,78%

İZMİR

2.751.913

2.657.447

94.466

3,43%

KAHRAMANMARAŞ

614.382

593.986

20.396

3,32%

KAYSERİ

799.899

767.715

32.184

4,02%

KOCAELİ

1.069.728

1.024.289

45.439

4,25%

KONYA

1.262.689

1.205.325

57.364

4,54%

MALATYA

492.694

483.166

9.528

1,93%

MANİSA

924.927

885.759

39.168

4,23%

MARDİN

330.317

321.601

8.716

2,64%

MERSİN

1.060.859

1.016.158

44.701

4,21%

MUĞLA

583.247

557.889

25.358

4,35%

ORDU

463.054

440.428

22.626

4,89%

SAKARYA

595.627

576.368

19.259

3,23%

SAMSUN

802.705

770.201

32.504

4,05%

ŞANLIURFA

828.156

802.059

26.097

3,15%

TEKİRDAĞ

573.443

550.441

23.002

4,01%

TRABZON

475.785

459.858

15.927

3,35%

VAN

451.065

439.154

11.911

2,64%

2014 30-Metro

36.480.478

35.118.947

1.361.531

3,73%

I have compiled the following table below, which provides the number of invalid ballots for the 2009 local elections, using the Higher Election Council figures.

2009 Metro

Cast Ballots

Valid Ballots

Invalid Ballots

2009 Invalid %

2014 Invalid %

Delta

ADANA

835.470

802.522

32.948

3,94%

3,86%

0,08%

ANKARA

2.533.176

2.440.455

92.721

3,66%

3,35%

0,31%

ANTALYA

539.782

524.052

15.730

2,91%

3,17%

-0,26%

BURSA

1.122.453

1.074.707

47.746

4,25%

4,11%

0,14%

DİYARBAKIR

360.973

349.230

11.743

3,25%

5,19%

-1,94%

ERZURUM

183.443

178.380

5.063

2,76%

3,23%

-0,47%

ESKİŞEHİR

392.825

378.540

14.285

3,64%

3,72%

-0,08%

GAZİANTEP

594.367

569.897

24.470

4,12%

3,06%

1,06%

İSTANBUL

7.199.083

6.946.435

252.648

3,51%

3,78%

-0,27%

İZMİR

2.043.178

1.972.359

70.819

3,47%

3,43%

0,03%

KAYSERİ

494.668

477.233

17.435

3,52%

4,02%

-0,50%

KOCAELİ

891.735

857.940

33.795

3,79%

4,25%

-0,46%

KONYA

537.776

521.199

16.577

3,08%

4,54%

-1,46%

MERSİN

456.339

439.265

17.074

3,74%

4,21%

-0,47%

SAKARYA

362.515

351.875

10.640

2,94%

3,23%

-0,30%

SAMSUN

313.710

299.805

13.905

4,43%

4,05%

0,38%

2009-16 Metro

18.866.391

18.166.597

699.794

3,71%

3,73%

In 2009, there were 16 provinces in Turkey that were also metropolitan areas ("büyükşehir" in Turkish). Even for those 16 provinces, the metropolitan areas in those provinces did not encompass the whole province. In 2013, the law pertaining to the metropolitan areas was changed. The new law increased the number of provinces having metropolitan municipalities to 30, from 16. Furthermore, the metropolitan areas in all these 30 provinces were enlarged to cover the whole area of the province.

Remarkably, the percentage of invalid votes for the total of 16 metro areas in 2009, 3.71%, is just 0.02% short of the percentage of invalid votes for the total of 30 metro areas in 2014, namely 3.73%!

If we compare the figures for invalid ballots for each metro area, we see that the diffence between the percentages are less than 0.50% for most of them. In only 3 metro areas do we see the percentage of invalid ballots changing more than 1% between 2009 and 2014.

(iii) Less Ballot Boxes May Have Meant More Invalid Ballots

One result of the new metropolitan ares law that went into effect just before this election was that the so-called "Provincial General Assemblies" (İl Genel Meclisi) were abolished for the metropolitan areas. Previously, a metropolitan area did not cover the whole province, hence the only assembly that the whole province voted was these provincial general assemblies. With the new law, the Metropolitan Municipality Assembly, which consists of the union of all county assemblies in the province, covers the whole province, rendering the general assemblies unnecessary. In previous elections, a separate ballot box, and a separate set of ballots and ballot envelopes, were used for the general assembly elections. This meant voting in a metropolitan area was a 3 step-process. Voters would first be presented with the ballots for the mayoral elections and the corresponding envelope. They would cast their votes, place the envelope in the corresponding box, and then they would be given ballots for the provincial general assembly, return to the voting booth, and cast the envelope in the second box. Finally, they would be presented with an envelope for the local quarter (mahalle) elections. When there were three boxes and three rounds of voting, it was easy for the voters to comprehend that ballots of the mayoral elections (unified ballots, printed by the Higher Election Council) and ballots for local quarter elections (separate ballots provided by candidates themselves) would go into the corresponding envelopes. Now, in this elections, the elimination of the general provincial assemblies increased the probability that voters might think all ballots, including those for the local quarter elections, should go into a single envelope. This apparently increased the number of invalid ballots.

Meyersson's analysis does not take into account how this might have affected the invalid ballot count. On the other hand, looking at the tables I have provided above, it seems that even if decreasing the number of ballot boxes from 3 to 2 had an adverse effect on the invalid ballots, it certainly did not cause the invalid ballot percentage to shoot through the roof. So how to make sense of all this? This brings to my final argument against Meyersson's blog post.

(iv) The Ceteris Paribus condition is violated at all levels by Meyersson

The fundamental rule of scientific analysis gets different names in different disciplines but the idea is just the same. In physics and other natural sciences, we talk about "controlled experiments" where only one variable is changed and everything else is kept constant. In medicine, we talk about "evidence based medicine" which takes clinical trials as the basis, and the "double blinded clinical trials" are the backbone of golden standards. In economics, we talk about the Ceteris Paribus condition, that is, "Other things being equal." I am not a statistician, but I know that the most important point in statistics is to keep the sample domain random. Meyersson's analysis is based on the premise that the correlation between the AKP votes and invalid ballots at ballot box level is the control variable. He then compares the results between different metropolitan areas. He finds that in such places as Konya and Kayseri, the correlation between AKP votes and invalid ballots is weak, whereas in places such as Ankara and Istanbul, there is a strong(er) correlation. He argues that this points to voting fraud. The underlying assumption in Meyersson's analysis is that all other things are being equal when moving from the Konya, Kayseri etc datasets to Ankara, Istanbul, etc datasets. This is simply not true.

One important "thing" that may not be equal is the attendance rate. If we look at province-wide attendance rates, we see them to be remarkably close to each other, being around 90%. How about the attendance rates at ballot box level? Meyersson's analysis assumes attendance rates at individual ballot boxes does not have any effect on the relationship he posits between AKP votes and invalid ballots. I find this to be highly dubious.

I have already presented another point in the first section above. Some invalid ballots are cast that way deliberately, as a political expression, whereas others are simply due to voter errors. We simply cannot assume that the ratio of deliberately cast invalid ballots to mistakenly cast invalid ballots is constant. If Meyersson plotted AKP votes against, say, Saadet (SP) votes, or any other party's votes, he could well have come up with results similar to these results.

Another way of controlling the variables would be to make a comparison between 2009 and 2014. The results of the 2009 election are available at ballot box level. I have provided tables above showing the invalid ballots for the metropolitan areas for both 2014 and 2009 elections. Looking at these tables, the invalid ballot rates for this election are consistent with the 2009 data.

Meyersson concludes his blog post by stating that "Until a valid explanation for these results is presented that does not include voter fraud it is difficult to imagine what else could be going on." He argues that his results point to voting fraud, but he does not explain how such a fraud could have been committed. He says nothing about the fact that close to 1 million ballot box committee members have served in this election, including one member from CHP and another from MHP for the great majority of the boxes (excepting the areas with strong BDP presence). How could a voting fraud have been committed at a ballot box, when the whole process was carried out in the presence of the two major opposition party members, who then did not hesitate to affix their signatures to the official ballot box result reports? Meyersson's analysis cannot provide answers to these questions.